I respectfully ask for your indulgence for writing this piece in a way that it’s thinking aloud.’ The last three episodes of this show calls for (at least at me) to write as ‘raw’ as I possibly could. I find myself changing my mind along the way as I wrote this post.

The difference between honesty and truthfulness is in the disclosure of relevant information. I can be perfectly honest and remain untruthful. For example, my wife can interrogate me and ask, “Have you been smoking?” And I can answer in all honesty “I haven’t been smoking in our room. Back off.”

My response to her is honest and factual. However, I did not truthfully answer her question. I could’ve been smoking somewhere else. I have not been truthful, having withheld information that I have indeed smoked elsewhere.

In light of this, Yuuki is no saint.

Mirai in the truck kept asking him questions that he honestly answered, but what would have been truthful is to make it clear that her questions are irrelevant. In Catholicism, a dead person must have been proven to have performed miracles to qualify for sainthood.

Communicating with the living while dead I think counts as a miracle, but I find issue in the misplaced compassion. I imagine Yuuki to be widtholding the fact that he is dead to Mirai, which leads her on and on, and on, and on.

Indifference to the suffering of others

Compassion? How about cruelty?

But as we see in the episode, there is a darkness to Yuuki. It’s not quite surprising, but given the tone of the past two episodes, it gives me a ‘dark’ feeling that sharply contrasts with his characteristically bright and cheerful character. Mirai opens the Marrionier Journal Yuuki’s friend Itsuki shows her, and reads Yuuki’s entry:

July 20: I planted a marrionier with Itsuki today. Onee-chan (Mirai) calls the marronier ‘macaroni.’ I think it’s because she’s a pig.

Mirai calls it.

I take it that she never called the plant such, and Yuuki was making this all up. This suggests that Yuuki makes things like this up to show people that his family is as happy as he wants to believe, a whole cake and not a fractured one.

Another inauthenticity: Yuuki wanted to go to the Robot convention in Odaiba. This is an honest statement. What’s withheld is his primary motivation: to cross the Odaiba bridge once more — to remember love, when love was family, whole and complete.

In this sense Mirai’s behavior is a more truthful picture of the health of the Onosawa family relations. She was bratty and aimless, whining and irritable. The damage was in plain sight considering the scant evidence seen; the observable dynamics in the Onosawa household.

Yuuki however, behaves with an optimism that can also be read as a whitewashing of his raw wounds — he’s too young to be scarred yet. The failures in mutual goodwill within his family are still happening in real time, and the damage to him is still being done.

So he makes things up in a journal. Making it seem that he and his sister get along more than they really do. When he says “…because I think she’s a pig,” he’s still being honest, but what’s being withheld is the lie about her calling the plant a macaroni, and that he could mean more than one thing when he calls her a pig.

So his lies unravel when Mirai tries to hand him the journal. An aftershock forces the reality to the surface.

There was no operation, no life-saving surgical drama. Yuuki was dead on arrival.

So finally, Yuuki undoes the lie. He tells Mirai himself that he is dead.

Everything I’ve said above, is not a complaint. This is where I complain: I wish the episode did not end there. I did not wish to spend the whole episode inside Mirai’s head, chasing a phantasm. The ending seems abrupt, it made the big reveal feel like a cliffhanger. It now raises questions:

How will Mirai take it? Will she break?

She and Itsuki will be trapped in that ruined school building; does Mirai get to ‘save’ Yuuki’s friend?

How does Mari figure in all of this?

I’ll withhold my judgment until everything is resolved. But I will say this: Looking forward to episode 10 felt a whole lot more intriguing, exciting, painful, and intense than how I feel about the coming episode.

Here I find a rather delicious slice of life. Whenever I find myself in a school I end up thinking this.

But wait! Wait!! Wait!!! I just remembered this is an 11 episode anime! Oh my good lord, Mari where are you? Having her so far from where this is happening disturbs me and fills me with a different kind of foreboding. Since the next episode is the finale, I feel that the questions above are far more significant than I initially gave them credit for.

Mirai doesn’t break. She holds up, and saves Itsuki. Mirai finds things that she can do. That’s the big theme here. Mari and Yuuki are supporting characters, both all but removed from the final equation. If this indeed comes to pass, I get my happy ending.

44 Responses to Where the Dead Lie: Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 10

I didn’t realize this was an 11-episode series, but it only reinforces my feelings. I think too much time was spent on this. It nails the point home, yes, about just how dishonest we can be with ourselves, or rather what the gravity of the situation is that Mirai’s brain would postpone realization until safety/parents were reached.

“I did not wish to spend the whole episode inside Mirai’s head, chasing a phantasm. The ending seems abrupt, it made the big reveal feel like a cliffhanger.”

That, basically, is what I’m trying to say. I don’t want this show to be about this, I want it to be about everything that the characters went through as a result of the earthquake (not that what I want changes what the story is about). Granted, this will be the one with the most lasting impact, but still.

I think it’s odd that you still blame Yuuki for all the lies after his death, when in fact only Mirai could make those lies. Yuuki only knew what she knew, because after all he wasn’t a ghost — he was a figment.

Well, my complaints about the number of contrivances required to sustain the whole “Mirai delusion” thing notwithstanding, my major problem about this episode was how drawn out the whole thing was. The whole back-and-forth with Yuuki disappearing every time Mirai had company just got more and more awkward and more contrived, and I just wanted the whole thing to end already and Yuuki just to come out and say it. It’s not the good type of “suspense” where you’re biting your nails in anticipation of what’s coming next… it’s the bad type of “suspense” where you’re over it and just want it to end already.

IMO, it just shows how weak the whole Mirai delusion thing is, because this episode probably would have been really dramatic as an opportunity for them to show Mirai mourn, without distraction. Instead, we get her playing make believe with her delusion (or, heaven forbid, as some people have been speculating, his ghost).

I agree that the method got more awkward and contrived up until the big reveal that surprised no one anymore. Part of the contrivance I make in this post is to project unto Yuuki (the character) the ambiguousness of the show’s presentation itself.

It’s not a successful conceit, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not wholly without merit.

I saw it differently – I felt that the back-and-forth appearances with Yuuki was a decent metaphor for how her wall of protection was starting to crumble as her consciousness was (as a result of her getting closer to home) slowly bringing reality back.

I thought it was pretty powerful, especially the scene where she is crying and doesn’t know why.

I just finished the episode, and I can’t say I’m especially pleased. The whole Yuuki delusion thing feels cheap, somehow, a sort of miniature version of the infamous “it was all a dream” end. I mean, it’d be fine (or, well, better) if they’d resolved it much sooner after the hospital incident, but I feel cheated when I spend time investing myself in a character who is in part essentially redacted in fictional time. I’m not inclined to whine about it as much as I did at, for example, the end of Clannad, but I’m left with a lesser version of the same feeling that those scenes trumped by revelation of information we didn’t but maybe should’ve known are, in a way, empty in retrospect.

My complaint isn’t even a matter of what happened. It’s more about presentation. If they were going to have Mirai snap like that, I would’ve liked more buildup. For comparison, Diebuster’s plot functions as a series of revelations, each capable of altering our conception of all that came before, but it’s like that consistently, from the very start. In Mag. 8, it feels like a cheap trick. To be fair, the feeling of disjointedness was lessened by the show’s vague precedent for obscuring dreams/imagination and reality, but, in my opinion, that precedent really needed to be stronger to justify episode 10.

But I’m complaining too much, and not trying hard enough to make the episode into something substantial; I appreciate that you’ve done so here. I like how you point out the untruthfulness, and I think you’re right, that Mirai’s initial state reflected more truthfully the state of her family — but her approach to the family changed over time, it became more like Yuuki’s as the show progressed. Maybe she really convinced herself that a natural disaster would, in itself, make her parents reevaluate their priorities, or maybe she adopted a more optimistic attitude for Yuuki’s sake. In a way, she’s become so untruthful by the tenth episode that her new family ideal isn’t even broken by Yuuki’s death; she just imagines him into existence for a while.

I sympathize with your case that the show didn’t provide enough precedent. My knee-jerk reaction to it also has this feeling of ‘cheapness’ though I didn’t articulate it as such. I think I would have been happier if the big reveal occurred in the truck and not in the school building. This to me felt like a betrayal of some kind… (phantasmal) Yuuki withheld telling Mirai, agreeing to visit Odaiba again someday when that really isn’t possible.

The more I think about it, the more I like this sudden challenge to Mirai about how she’ll deal with the future of her family. I imagine her salvation lies going beyond her family as it presently stands, to involve herself with the Kusakabes.

Hey a reasonable assesment of this show for a change. To borrow from Chris of Gundamn!@mahq I think this show has turned into quite the trollwreck. With this rush to condemn the show over the Yuuki issue it seems like a lot of people have missed the chance to point to what this show has done well and made interesting. Choosing to focus your attention elsewhere (and on something I never would have considered myself) with this weeks episode instead of on trying to tear the show down seems to me a good way to remember love. Just another in a long list of reasons why I’m glad we partnered up. 🙂 There are precious few people these days that I feel I can bounce ideas off of and have new ones come back to me as a reward for my efforts.

Going in that direction, what do you think of the possibility of Mirai’s psyche conjuring Yuuki up to protect her from the realization of Yuuki’s death in order to come to terms with it only when the time is right. It looks like that time has come, but of course those devious people would never show us any of her reaction to the truth this week and have left us to stew and fret. I admit it hard to wait this long before being able to pass judgement and extremely frustrating as well, but I think those that do find the strength to wait will almost certainly be in the best position to judge it fairly in the end. Those of course are the only people’s final words that I plan to take into long-term consideration when the time comes, in keeping with my traditional solution to discussing controversial anime.

“Going in that direction, what do you think of the possibility of Mirai’s psyche conjuring Yuuki up to protect her from the realization of Yuuki’s death in order to come to terms with it only when the time is right”

Pretty much what I was trying to say: she’s reached relative safety and a reunion with her parents is imminent, so her mind let reality take over. But then again, it’s also possible that the mental shock of the house collapse snapped her back to the truth as well.

After episode 8, I was skeptical. People were just seeing figments in the clouds; “Yuuki is a fantasy” had to be a crazy fantasy of their own devices. This show’s good, but not that good.

After episode 9, I became a believer. Yuuki never talks with anyone besides Mirai? He comes up with all the good ideas Mirai puts into action? For 2 whole episodes? And of course the backpack at the end of the episode. Sneaky bastards, writing two consecutive episodes that could be interpreted two entirely and opposite ways, that’s one hell of a fake out. This could great. This could elevate TM8.0 to the stuff of legends.

After episode 10, my patience has been worn thin. Playing that Yuuki disappearing act repeatedly grew weary, like how jumping out of the way of falling ruble was exciting the first time, but not so much every episode. It’s like they overshot the sweetspot, the perfect bullseye that would’ve had everyone awestruck, and instead milked it for time just so the episode could end in cliffhanger. Everyone said it, the execution just wasn’t there.

Still, I wonder how many of us would’ve seen this whole thing coming, or at least delayed our individual realization much, much later, had we not been privy to the collective knowledge of the online community and conspiracy mentality the All Powerful Internet breeds. Myself, this blog, and others I’ve read did major double takes to see this first. I can only imagine how it would’ve been to experience TM8.0 in relative isolation.

All very interesting and reasonable. I also like the considerations you put forward as to how it could be like to experience this show in isolation. I purposely tried to avoid reading about episode 10 even from tweets and such prior to my viewing it, and I wrote as raw as I could.

My only real gripe with TM 8.0 was that they just took the “Yuuki” thing a bit too far. I could accept that Mirai was having a temporary mental break (I’ve seen them happen to grown men while I was in the army) or I could accept the “Yuuki” as a ghost/spirit, but I feel that they just strung the viewers along. I still feel that TM 8.0 is a wonderful series, in fact, one of the year’s best.

The only thing that would seriously piss me off is having Mirai, Mari, or one of Mirai’s parents die at the last minute, that would be totally unrealistic with the current situation in the area. A bad ending I would find realistic would be Mirai still having a hard time adjusting, or Mirai’s family breaking up after Yuuki’s death. But, I’m hoping for a better ending with Mirai becoming a better person along with she and her family becoming friends with Mari’s family, with maybe even Mari becoming a “older sister” role model for Mirai, and Mirai becoming a “older sister” role model from Mari’s daughter.

I think that if they killed Mirai off, or she commits suicide, or she dies in some meaningless way in the last episode it would be like the creators poking a stick in the viewers eyes and saying, “we can have anybody die, so take that”.

But, what I’m really hoping for is a melancholy, but hopeful ending, I really feel that life needs to go on for the living, Mirai (the future) and her classmates need to rebuild a better, safer neo-Tokyo.

That’s a reasonable take on things… but I have a philosophical distaste for hope, though I like melancholy a lot. I can be satisfied with the resolution you propose to be sure, but a utterly bleak, crushing end is something I can look forward to as well.

what im really pissed about is that every episode has an announcement where it says that they strive to showcase a touch of realism. the living talking with the dead contradicts that matter. it’s not that i don’t believe such things to happen but, for some reason, a realistic-themed anime pulling a stunt like that reverted it back to how the producers would suddenly pull a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. the next thing you know, they could pull a cloverfield monster that caused the earthquake.

but that aside, i guess what i’m actually mad about is that im beginning to fool myself that mirai’s denial of yuki’s death forced him to become a “ghost”. in other fictional works, ghosts pop up if they still have some unfinished business and i guess, the same goes for yuki. i guess, he just wanted to reach out his feelings to mirai. just when mirai grew up to be a model sister his younger brother died… wtf. i guess the reason why mari ran after them in episode 9 was because of what mirai wrote in the letter, mentioning yuki (i think) making mari fear that mirai was having delusions that yuki was still there. i wonder how things would end next episode.

I don’t think it’s a ghost, though Yuuki does end up extremely ghost-like I think this is because Mirai does know the truth in spite of the denial. Notice she doesn’t try to convince other people he’s there: he just vanishes, he’s somewhere else. That cut from looking for him in the school building to walking along the road to Itsuki’s house is telling, since there was nothing to find they started walking and Yuuki popped up next to Mirai.

The human mind is incredibly resilient, and can, even in the face of insurmountable reality, reject huge chunks of it. In the truck Yuuki presents the possibility to Mirai, but she rejects it completely.

Hallucination is a real condition, and can occur by a multitude of causes, including stress and shock, so while the portrayal of the situation appears supernatural to us, this is because our lens into this story is Mirai’s perception of reality and thus tainted by her own mental state.

In the end she just hallucinated Yuuki. The worst part is that it took her away from Mari, but from this point of view it’s not that hard to consider that action a form of running away. Ghost Yuuki is herself, after all.

the ” in “ghost” didn’t mean that i believed in the supernatural sense. i just coined the term to lay it flat out in my terms. but yeah, mirai definitely had halucinations but would it be safe to assume that yuki lead her to enter the 2nd floor in order to trigger the classroom event? after all, mirai never had any idea where his classroom. sure she was lead on his artworks and on his desk but all those would never had occurred if she wasn’t lead there in the 1st place right?

Like animewriter says above, he’s seen this kind of thing happen in the military. I think it’s called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD).

I’ll take this opportunity to say that the claims to realism concern the depiction of earthquake dynamics. I feel that many have taken this claim to a very literal degree. That said, PSTD is very real.

Once again I have this feeling that somehow the English translation loses some of the nuances present in the Japanese and causes the tone of some scenes to change.

In the scene where Mirai looks at Yuuki’s journal and says “Uso bakari”, it looks like it was translated at “It’s all lies.”

While that is literally correct, I don’t think it captures the nuance at all. Usually when people say that in real life, especially with the kind of lighthearted tone Mirai had, the connotation is more of like saying jokingly, “You big liar!”

It’s more of a reaction to his calling her a “kuishinbo”, which means a “person who really likes food”, but again has more of a joking feeling to it that calling somebody a “pig” or a “glutton”.

To say that Yuuki was “lying” is a bit of a stretch based on the information we have. I would also say in other circumstances where he “withheld” information, it wasn’t so much that he was doing it to intentionally hide his objective. He’s just a kid and has trouble expressing what he wants.

If anything, I’d say it’s more a testament to his courage that he consistently focuses on the positive and doesn’t dwell on the unpleasant stuff. It’s hardly dishonest; he’s just trying to help those around him. Every time Yuuki tries to have “the talk” with Mirai, she either cuts him off or avoids the subject. Instead of pushing the issue, Yuuki recognizes that Mirai isn’t ready to move on yet, so he patiently “stays” and supports her as long as possible.

Calling it dishonesty seems like it’s belittling his selflessness and bravery.

It does seem like it, but no, I don’t belittle Yuuki at all. As I’ve said in previous articles, Yuuki represents my idealized childhood self.

Also, I don’t make value judgments about deceit or even cruelty. I find these things very interesting in fiction, and not as ‘messages’ or ‘lessons,’ not to say that you do think of them as such; I only feel that my framing the events/behavior as inauthenticity or deceit becomes a real problem in that context.

In any case, this Yuuki is a phantasm — a construct of Mirai’s imagination and memory of him. Any deceit, whether contextualized as compassion or cruelty is a compounded deception within Mirai’s consciousness. It is a conceit or contrivance on my part, so as to be analogous to what many feel as a problematic presentation of the resolution of the narrative.

Personally, I think it’s a little odd to proscribe the “lies” in this episode directly to Yuuki when, as we know, he’s already dead. We aren’t seeing Yuuki in this episode at all, but rather Mirai’s constructed memory of him, a blend of the Yuuki she knows and remembers with a brother who is convenient to her traumatised worldview. He isn’t there to shout from the rooftops that he is no more, but rather to protect Mirai’s mind from that very fact until a point where she can cope with that realisation.

That aside, I agree with some others here that I think Mirai’s delusions (for want of a better word) went on a little longer than I would have liked, but on the other hand I thought the climax to this episode was almost masterful – Just like Mirai, we to had to go through the pain of Yuuki’s death yet again to learn what we knew deep-down for some time. As a study of Mirai’s mental trauma, this series has gone places I would never have expected, and I can only commend it for that.

Yes it is odd, as I contrived it deliberately as a conceit for this essay. Your take is correct — I do see him as a phantasm of Mirai’s mind. As I’ve replied to other commenters above, I see it as an analogue for the problematic presentation of the plot resolution. Ambitious on my part? Absolutely.

I think the show was very ambitious too over the last three episodes. I felt inspired to give it all I got as well for this post.

I think everything that I felt about the episode has already been said in some way or form above. The episode left me feeling more “how much longer is this gonna take”, and not the good suspense that was there at the end of last week.

I personally would’ve preferred the reveal to happen while in the truck. Or, a change in POV. Mirai kept on talking to Yuuki but we aren’t shown Yuuki anymore. That would’ve been crushing to watch, in a good way.

I thought Mirai and Itsuki are trapped at Itsuki’s home? The way I interpreted that aftershock scene was a bit different because Yuuki being there led Mirai to a portion of the house that didn’t collapse. If he hadn’t been there, things may have turned out differently.

I feel that you are being too harsh on Yuuki, it’s his optimism that is a breath of fresh air among the other characters, even if he does has to bend reality here or there.

ST. YUUKI, IF THE FALL ANIME SCHEDULE IS IRREVERSIBLY WITHOUT ROBOT ANIME, PLEASE GIVE US 2010. FILL IT WITH ROBOT GOODNESS, ROBOT TRASH, GIVE US ROBOT SHOWS OF ALL KINDS. MAKE NEXT YEAR THE YEAR OF ROBOT ANIME AND I WILL PUT THE TOKYO TOWER BACK TOGETHER WITH MY BARE HANDS. AMEN.

I don’t have much to say on this episode. Maybe it is because I consider myself an anime veteran and have seen this technique used before to more effect. It just felt cruel and almost unnecessary to have this misunderstanding drag out for so long. I felt more frustrated than moved.

Sorry for the late reply. I know it was done in the original Clannad. Though I can’t get too far into specifics without a spoiler tag. And I believe it was done in Air or Kanon, I have trouble remembering which. It was a dub that Anime Network put on my On Demand cable service. And to be truthful I didn’t enjoy the show too much. I thought I’d seen something similar in an anime movie, but I can’t remember it. I guess I don’t have much to back up my example. I guess I’ll pull something out of my ass…. the Sixth Sense does something rather similar to what TM 8.0 did with Yuuki.

Yes, episode 10 dragged on like no tomorrow. I have to agree that the reveal should`ve been on that truck, since Mirai would have to deal with telling her friends and family flat out that Yuuki was dead. Instead, she`s still in her disillusioned world that Yuuki is still there, leading her to tell the people she knows that Yuuki is just somewhere else at the moment (in and of itself a clue that Yuuki is pretty much dead). Though, I did like the full reveal of Yuukis death through Mirais memories of that day. It proved that the first half of the dream sequences was actual, while the other was an idealized version of his death. It could`ve been Mirai trying to find a rational way to think that Yuuki was dead (in an operating room, where doctors tried their best to save him) instead of the fairly more real way (in a tent like other patients, where there was really no other options to help him) that was created because of the earthquake.

Another thing I thought of was that Mirai could have made this ‘mental’ Yuuki to help her with her grieving. While in the end Mirais mind would have to realize that Yuuki was gone from this world, Mirai herself wanted a little more time with the brother that she just started to appreciate. It also could have been that she wanted to hold off on her grieving to help Mari, like she and Yuuki were intent on doing prior to his collapse in episode 7. Its just a type of speculation, but possible Mirais mind has matured over the course of her ordeal and she needed to make that final push home. Yuuki helped her, but in the end, her mind decided that since she was home, the ‘mental’ Yuuki needed to leave and she could rebuild her life from this point forward. How she`ll handle this, we`ll have to see, but otherwise I still am a huge fan of this show, even if it went down a strange road the last 3 episodes. 🙂

And I think that Mirai and Itsuki were in his house at the time of the aftershock? Since he needed to get the journal from his house, which is where the walk comes in in this episode.

I enjoyed it for all the wrong reasons; taken out of the context previous episodes it has a quite brilliant/melancholic tone throughout. My gripe was already back in the first episode after Yuuki collapsed (the confusion of dreams/non-dreams).

Freaking sad and heartbreaking when I think about it, but yea the Yuuki line was kinda strong. I also kinda think that Mirai’s Yuuki was her delusion and not necessarily his ghost.